The flow and flame dynamics within liquid fueled gas turbine combustors are complex due to the interactions between the highly turbulent flow, spray dynamics and combustion. Computational tools help understand these governing processes. Predictive modeling capabilities for gas turbine combustors are a necessity for accelerating the design optimization cycle as well as improving the understanding of combustion dynamics. Near nozzle spray characteristics are particularly challenging to obtain for initialization and validation of simulations. With the availability of high-quality X-ray data for the research combustor (ARC-M1), this near nozzle behavior can be characterized and used for extensive validation of the Computational Fluid Dynamics modeling approach at gas turbine conditions.
 

Some previous simulation efforts focused on capturing flow splits, spray physics, and fuel effects on lean blowout (LBO). However, the spray dynamics in the near nozzle region were not obtained from direct experimental measurements due to limitations of the optical techniques. Recent measurements using Argonne’s Advanced Photon Source (APS) facility provides a unique dataset for initialization and validation of near nozzle spray dynamics. With the goal of extending the state-of-the-art simulation efforts, our spray modeling approach with the unsteady Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) and Large-Eddy Simulations (LES) framework is validated against experimental data obtained from the near nozzle region. The validated model is, then, leveraged to understand fuel effects on ignition under cold conditions and LBO.